The race to build 80 nuclear weapon cores per year is stretching the U.S. supply of gloveboxes used to keep engineers radiation-free while manipulating plutonium and other hazardous materials.
The equipment is becoming difficult to source, Michael Robinson, vice president of project management for Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) earlier this month said at the Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association annual conference in Knoxville. CNS manages both Y-12 and Pantex – the primary U.S. nuclear weapons clearinghouse – for the NNSA.
Many of the most sophisticated airtight metal gloveboxes being manufactured today are destined for one of two sites: the Plutonium Facility, or PF4, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico or the new Plutonium Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s most pressing mission is to build 80 plutonium pits per year between the two sites – 30 at Los Alamos and at least 50 at Savannah River – as soon after 2030 as possible. The highly classified and heavily guarded PF4 facility at Los Alamos is filled with a series of interlinked gloveboxes that form a sort of assembly line for pits, as Exchange Monitor saw on a tour earlier this year.
Many of those gloveboxes are aging, experience glove breaches or need to be updated to modern safety standards, PF4 personnel said. Many will be replaced with newer, more robust and seismically sound versions. That process is already underway.
During the tour, Robert Webster, the deputy weapons director for Triad Nuclear Security, which manages Los Alamos, told reporters that the plutonium mission is essentially dominating the supply chain of national-security-grade gloveboxes.
NNSA’s glovebox working group identifies four categories of gloveboxes. Type 1 is a simple glovebox that typically takes 15-18 months to complete from manufacturing to installation and operation and has little to no integration with other equipment, the NNSA said. Type 4 gloveboxes take around 48 months to complete and are complex, usually involving integrating complex equipment. Types 2 and 3 fall within that range of complexity and capability.
“For the most part, each glovebox is unique in its design; all of the gloveboxes that the glovebox working group track are capable of handling radioactive materials,” the NNSA said. “The glovebox supply chain is not unlimited. NNSA is fully prepared to manage any potential risks to modernization efforts.”
Other sites not working directly on the plutonium mission, but with other nuke components, like the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Pantex Plant in Texas, need high-end, U.S.-built gloveboxes, as well.
“We need glove boxes and hoods, but it is not to the same scale as, say, the plutonium mission,” Robinson said Oct. 4. “Suppliers and vendors, fabricators are interested in looking at alternative sources that may have provided gloveboxes in the past, there’s probably a half a dozen larger contractors that have some recent experience and are very involved in the plutonium mission, but we need gloveboxes and hoods, too.”
NNSA site landlord contractors like CNS select their own glovebox suppliers, the NNSA said.
Nine companies supply the NNSA with the airtight metal boxes that are sealed and pressurized to keep radiation from escaping, according to an NNSA spokesperson. Almost all of them, especially ones used to construct parts for nuclear weapons, must be in the U.S., the NNSA said.
“Mission requirements determine where gloveboxes are built,” the NNSA told Exchange Monitor in an email. “Few exceptions apply, but gloveboxes used for nuclear weapons research or production must be made in the U.S .by U.S.-owned fabricators. Gloveboxes used for basic research or production of radionucleotides can be fabricated outside of the U.S. and by non-U.S. companies.”
Some of the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility gloveboxes at the Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, S.C., were fabricated outside of the United States.